To Slay a Dragon
by Winter's She-Wolf
Summary: She meant to assassinate him. This was not part of that plan.


**AN:** This story is a response to a prompt at the LiveJournal kink meme: S_he meant to assassinate him. This was not part of that plan._ Basically, Arya has been with the Faceless Men for the last three years. The situation in the Seven Kingdoms has only gotten worse with more rebellions cropping up. Arya comes back to Westeros on assignment to kill the man calling himself Aegon Targaryen.

**Chapter 1**

The Kindly Man calls him the Mummer's Dragon.

In a Westeros bleeding war from the Wall to the Summer Sea, he is one of the latest to name himself "the rightful king." But this one also claims to be the blood of the dragon. The son of Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia. The only one with a stronger claim to the throne than the daughter of the Mad King. That's why he must die. The Mother of Dragons made a great sacrifice to see that it is done.

So No One travels across the narrow sea wearing the scarred face of a fallen princess. At night she dreams of bloody swords, shrieks of agony, and pain – mostly pain. The face once belonged to a girl who lost her family, wealth, and virtue to war and saw only one way to make the hurt stop.

No One wears this face more easily than any of the others. Within this skin, No One becomes Jeyne, a scarred girl looking for work in the Stormlands. Nothing special. Just one of the many helpless and displaced.

That's how she finds a place among the staff of Storm's End serving King Aegon Targaryen, the Sixth of His Name, the Mummer's Dragon. Her task is to watch him. Study him. Make this cloth dragon's death appear as a betrayal from a dear friend and lifelong ally.

So Jeyne, the serving girl, waits and watches.

* * *

"You're dead!"

The second the point presses against her spine, instinct guides her motions. She whirls around, knocking the sword out of the attacker's grasp, catches it with her free right hand, and then holds the weapons crossed over the attacker's neck.

Fear fills the purple eyes that greet her. But the emotion soon gives way to laughter.

"You are quick!" Aegon says, taking a step back and reclaiming one of the wooden training swords. "Very quick. I have never seen a woman do such a thing. Where did you learn that, Jeyne?"

The assassin curses herself. This is a sloppy mistake. She should have heard, smelled, sensed him long before he managed to creep upon her.

While taking the measure of Storm's End one night, Jeyne found a few wooden training swords in an empty, neglected courtyard. The memory of a ghost urged her to take up one of the swords and slide sideways into the stance of a water dancer before an invisible opponent. That's when Aegon Targaryen came upon her from behind, interrupting No One's dancing duel with the girl she had once been.

So sloppy a mistake can never occur again.

She slips easily back into the full guise of Jeyne, the orphaned, insignificant servant. "Forgive me, Your Grace," she says with lowered eyes. "I didn't mean to disturb you. I thought not to find anybody awake. I'll be out of your way."

Aegon steps into her path.

"There's no disturbance," he insists. "I rather liked watching you."

She had never seen such amusement in his eyes before. The feeling moves with foreign steps across his face. What she usually witnesses marring his features are much darker emotions. Anger at the questioning of his true identity. Frustration from the lack of progress his campaign has seen since beginning three years past. Petulance born from still being treated as a child despite so long being a man grown. Even a touch of arrogance.

Those were the emotions that warred across the King's face, not amusement. Yet, here he stands directly in her path, smiling at her. No One studies him as she has so many times past to find his true intent. Lust? Cruelty? Both? The girl's scarred face should shield her from the former.

"I asked where you learned to move that way, Jeyne."

"The young lords I served growing up, Your Grace." The lie comes easily. Jeyne has become as real as though she hadn't merely been born in the mind of a no one. "They took lessons from a bravo for a time. I would watch them in the training yard. For sport, the youngest sparred with me in the godswood when his brothers beat him too badly."

Aegon laughs. "This is no godswood." He gestures to the shadowy courtyard around them before assuming a duelist stance. "But, shall we?"

The pure shock does not appear on her face. "If Your Grace wishes it."

"And stop with all these 'Your Grace's,'" he says. "There was a time those words were all I wanted. Now…" He tosses the stray locks of silver out of his face. "You may call me Griff this night. And have no fear. I will hold back my full strength."

Something deep within bristled in outrage at the suggestion. _Hold back? You'll need everything you have to best me, you stupid white haired- _But that is someone else. Jeyne, unseasoned in the art of fighting, has no reason to take offense. She should be honored to have attracted the notice of a king, even if he is one of multiple in the land.

So that is how she responds, with a grateful, honored smile and a nod before they dance.

The assassin is the one to hold back the full extent of her skill. Jeyne lets out sharp gasps with each tap of his wooden sword against her skin. She releases helpless cries each time Aegon disarms her. But still, another part of her cannot stop herself from knocking the wooden sword out of his hand more than three times, treating him with the wide eyes of surprise each time.

"Not bad for a girl," Aegon says, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand when they finish.

_For a girl._ This time it is a full howl that boils in the pit of her stomach, threatening to erupt into a challenge to fight again, each at their full ability. _I killed more men by my twelfth name day than you did in your whole life!_ she wants to growl.

But not yet. She still has watching and waiting to do.

"Thank you, Your Gra- Griff," she says, Jeyne's meek subservience locking away the quick anger of the ghost.

"With real training," Aegon continues, watching her with interest, "you would be fearsome."

* * *

Jeyne is not beautiful. Not even pretty. Even if the side of her face wasn't mangled with a scar from a burn, the girl would still be no more than homely. Yet, ever since the night Aegon found her moving with deadly gracefulness in a solitary battle with no one, he can't help but follow her with his eyes while she goes about her daily duties.

Fascination at the ferocity he saw flashing once or twice just beneath the surface of her submissiveness while they dueled, tethers his gaze and makes him long to urge the fighter within her out again.

So he talks with her. It starts out with the intention of curiously wheedling information to draw a broader picture of the girl. He should know about his subjects if he means to rule. Who was a better judge of the kingdom's shortcomings than a common servant who felt the brunt of them daily? Yet, somehow, during the several encounters they share, the situation reverses. Without really knowing how it all started, Aegon finds himself telling her things he could never share with Jon, Haldon, or any of the others who spent so many years readying him for the moment he would reclaim the Iron Throne.

"I thought this would be a song," he says one evening after dinner. He insisted she set down the empty plates and sit with him, even offering her some of the remaining candied ginger Illyrio sent. "I thought I would come home to cheering crowds and eager subjects, take in a few battles and some glory, and then take back my family's throne. None of that happened though, except the battles."

But there was no glory to be had in those soggy fields of blood. As for the seat of his ancestors…

"The Iron Throne seemed so much closer to being mine when I was just the son of a sellsword living on the _Shy Maid_," he says, silently offering Jeyne more of the candied ginger. "Everything was possible, everything within my grasp."

"I felt like everything could be mine once too," she says, biting her lip and gazing ahead at nothing.

"You did not," he says jovially.

Her features instantly spring to life. "Did too!"

Aegon wants to laugh. He very nearly does. How could a mere servant feel that way? But then his amused eyes meet her gaze and find that illusive ferocity there. Meek and obedient Jeyne could never dare to hope the world was hers to conquer. The girl within, the one with the gray fury twisting inside of her like a winter's storm, she could. She does.

"When?" Aegon asks. "How?"

But then Jeyne returns, slumped shoulders, downturned gaze, and all. The fierceness is gone.

"Forgive me, Your Grace, I-"

"Tell me."

She pauses a moment, biting her lip again.

"When I used to practice with my sword," she says, finally. "I was stupid then. I thought…" Life returns to her eyes once more as she looks up to hold his gaze. "I thought I would become the greatest fighter in all the world. Greater than even Queen Nymeria or Queen Visenya." She glances down at her hands, now sticky from the candied ginger. "I was stupid… Stupid, stupid, stupid…"

_Jeyne is gone_, Aegon realizes again. He knows no other way to describe the person he saw now before him.

"What happened?"

"I became a sheep, then a mouse, then a ghost… and now no one."

_All servants must feel like no ones_, Aegon mused, remembering how surprised a few other serving girls were when he memorized their names immediately.

He thinks about her dreams of becoming a warrior.

_All of that from playing with a wooden sword_?

"Spar with me again," he finds himself saying. He must see this warrior queen she dreamed to be.

As Aegon crosses toy blades with the young woman, a comforting sense of carefree childishness overtakes him. When he barks out a laugh at being disarmed by her, the amusement is born of pure joy. When was the last time he was permitted to enjoy himself? Not since landing in these blasted Stormlands, that was for certain.

"Lucky strike!" He retrieves the training sword. "But don't think you'll catch me off guard again."

He doesn't see his own good humor mirrored in her features.

"Lucky?" Jeyne holds his gaze for a beat. "Aye, very lucky. Start again, Your Gr- Griff?"

No sooner do they cross again, but Aegon feels the air forced from his lungs with his body's sudden impact with the ground. He finds himself on his back, the sword just out of reach, and Jeyne standing above him, her own sword directed at his throat.

"You received more training than you told me," he says. The young king doesn't bother to rise. Aegon merely tries to remember the moves she used to disarm him and knock the legs from under him. He cannot. The movements were to quick and fluid to follow.

"No, Griff. It was luck. For true."

But no subservience washes over her, weighting down her shoulders and lowering her gaze.

"You are lying to me, Jeyne!"

"Or you're just not as good as you think you are," she says.

Rising, Aegon blows out a breath, almost expecting smoke and a touch of flame to crackle out of him, so angry is he.

"Who are you?" Aegon demands.

An assassin? No. He would surely be dead by now if she were.

Her eyes are downcast, but she is unable to remove the stormy ice from her stance and features. He grabs her by the shoulders and she glares up at him with silvery eyes that don't belong to this scarred face.

She is not beautiful. She isn't. But somehow, when he looks into her eyes, she is.

"Jeyne." He pulls her closer, trying not to bruise her slender shoulders with his anger. "I will have the truth. Who are you?"

"No one," she says. "No one at all."

That is the truth. The naked honesty of it jolts him because Aegon can see it as a reflection of himself.

Who is he if not a no one? He isn't Griff of Tyrosh. Jon Connington sees him as the second coming of Prince Rhaegar, an image he can never fill. His family refuses to believe he is Aegon Targayen. So that leaves him with nothing. No identity at all.

No one. No home. No family. Nowhere to belong.

Aegon never thought to meet anyone who could possibly feel the same. But with Jeyne looking up at him with that same emptiness…

He doesn't mean to kiss her. Without knowing how it happened, Aegon finds that his mouth has captured hers. He knows he shouldn't do this, shouldn't take advantage of a servant this way. But he is.

First, there is no response. He might as well press his lips against a sheet of ice, hard and unyielding. Yet, when his tongue caresses the line between her lips, they open, melting at his touch. Their mouths and tongues move together, the faint taste of candied ginger shared between them. His pace is all urgency and exploration. Hers is hesitant curiosity.

Aegon doesn't want to break the contact. Not now when he has found this person who so perfectly embodies that lonely part of him no one else can even comprehend. Yet, the young king pulls way, gasping for air. He keeps Jeyne close, their chests brush against each other as they heave.

Her eyes –why can he not seem to recover from her eyes? – remain fastened upon him, not with the look of a duelist ready to fight, not with dutiful submission, but with blatant curiosity and wonder.

They simply stare at each other for a beat.

Rising onto the tips of her shoes, Jeyne takes Aegon's face between her hands and their mouths meet again. This time the girl moves as hot and hungry as he, despite her inexperience.

When she finally turns away with a gasp, her hands still cling to the back of his neck and into his silver hair. Aegon's lips press against her temple briefly before trailing down to her ear.

Jeyne instantly stiffens. The electricity no longer charges between them. All is dead and silent. She doesn't even breathe.

Suddenly, she's looking through him, beyond him. "Will that be all, Your Grace?"

"I- Yes, that will be all," he says. "Thank you, Jeyne."

He watches her walk away, more fascinated and uncertain than before.


End file.
